My reflection from this week's Pritchard and Honeycutt reading:
Frankly, I feel a bit cheated after having read our assignments for the past few weeks that talk about writing workshops! From the readings it sounds like the idea of writing workshops has been around for more than 30 years but most of what I remember is being given a prompt and being told to write about a topic that was already chosen by the teacher. Imagine how much more fun and creative it would be to let our students have the choice to pick their topics and to enjoy reading their papers aloud to peer groups for editing. I do agree with their (P&H) assessment that some teachers would be concerned that the class would get out of control. I do think that several rules need to be in place for the workshop to be successful, but I feel that the risk of a little noise way outweighs the pleasure that would come from having the students be excited about writing. I love the idea of having teachers trained to be writers so that we can write with our students and model for them. Pritchard and Honeycutt confirm that NWP trained teachers have more confidence and that their students have been proven to benefit from having trained teachers.
i did it!! i made a link!!!
My reflection from this week's Pritchard and Honeycutt reading:
Frankly, I feel a bit cheated after having read our assignments for the past few weeks that talk about writing workshops! From the readings it sounds like the idea of writing workshops has been around for more than 30 years but most of what I remember is being given a prompt and being told to write about a topic that was already chosen by the teacher. Imagine how much more fun and creative it would be to let our students have the choice to pick their topics and to enjoy reading their papers aloud to peer groups for editing. I do agree with their (P&H) assessment that some teachers would be concerned that the class would get out of control. I do think that several rules need to be in place for the workshop to be successful, but I feel that the risk of a little noise way outweighs the pleasure that would come from having the students be excited about writing. I love the idea of having teachers trained to be writers so that we can write with our students and model for them. Pritchard and Honeycutt confirm that NWP trained teachers have more confidence and that their students have been proven to benefit from having trained teachers.